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Is sustainably faster delivery of customer focused solutions the key measure of a successful Agile transformation?

It’s a great measure, but it is of course a lagging indicator and not a leading indicator. By this I mean that you can’t know if you have achieved faster time to market until you have achieved it.

What leading indicators (or factors that change before a system starts to follow a pattern) can you measure and influence to see success in Agile transformation?

Brad Swanson’s approach to measuring leading indicators that influence sustainably faster delivery of customer focused solutions is terrific. I’ve adapted it here and added more:

Alignment of organisational priorities with customer value

• How frequently do stakeholders collaborate on prioritisation?
• How effectively are they collaborating?
• Is there a standard way to compare the business value of initiatives?
• Are portfolio priorities highly visible?

Growth of Agile practices

• How many people are trained in Agile?
• How many people in teams are coached?
• How many leaders are coached?
• How many Agile practices are leaders using?

Alignment and support across the organisation

• Is there senior leadership consensus on strategy?
• How frequent are communications on vision and strategy?
• Across what different forums is vision and strategy communicated?
• Are short-term wins visibly celebrated?
• How many hours is the Guiding Coalition working on activities?

Engaged happy people

• When polled, do people feel things are getting better or worse?
• Are there defined career paths for all roles?

Culture of continuous learning & improvement

• What is the average frequency of team retrospectives?
• When polled, do people feel safe to experiment and fail?
• What is the number of experimental learnings celebrated?

Transparent empirical view of organisational improvement

• Are metrics on organisational improvement visible to all?
• Are results communicated?

Incremental delivery

• How many projects are running concurrently?
• What is the average number of concurrent projects per person?
• How healthy are the program burn up charts?

So if you’re looking to tell the story of Agile transformation on a single slide, by all means map deployment frequency. The rest of the story is of course in measuring and influencing the above leading indicators of success.